


You Will Hear Thunder And Remember Me

by halcyon_autumn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, BuckyNat week, F/M, Post-CA:TWS, Red Room Memories, Sam Wilson is more than your therapist, Steve Rogers needs a team of therapists, Up all night to get Bucky, and Nat, implied sex, so does bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-03-18 08:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3563810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyon_autumn/pseuds/halcyon_autumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. The Black Widow and the Winter Soldier fight through a haze of brainwashing and lost memories. Against the growing threat of Hydra, the man who was James Barnes attempts to remember who he is; Natasha Romanoff tries to remember who she was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Was Your Insomnia, I Was Your Grief

It started after the second time they fought. Or perhaps it did start after the first fight, after he sent a bullet ripping through her outside of Odessa and she was unable to return the favor. Natasha Romanoff had searched for him with a desperation that had frightened her, because she couldn’t understand it. That happened; something would trigger a memory she couldn’t retrieve out of twenty years of brainwashing and memory modification, filling her with emotions she couldn’t account for. Once, she and Clint had been undercover in Buenos Aires, and she’d overheard a song on the radio that gave her a panic attack for no reason she could explain. After two weeks of nightmares, she discovered memories of torture in a dark room, with that song in the background. The Red Room, apparently, had decided she would be a more effective operative if she didn’t remember two days of torture.

            So when she’d tried to hunt the Winter Soldier the first time, she’d been alarmed by the strength of her desire, her need to find him. Because perhaps she’d met him, but perhaps someone she had hated had mentioned his name. Perhaps, as some theorized, “Winter Soldier” was simply a codename used over the decades, and she’d used it on a mission, just like the man who’d shot her. It didn’t matter; she couldn’t find him, and the intense need had faded over the years.

             But then, after she garroted him and he shot her – again, to her irritation – she started to remember. Sitting in the back of a truck, Sam and Steve and two Hydra guards crammed into the tiny space, she remembered his face. His eyes, evaluating her from a height that indicated she must have been young. His metal arm, gleaming as it flashed towards her head. The feel of his stomach muscles against her foot as she kicked him, with what she recognized as the smell of the red room in her nose. The familiar scents of sweat and blood had made her gag suddenly while Sam looked on in concern. The Winter Soldier’s lips on hers in an alleyway, his silhouette in her bedroom.

            Natasha had watched Steve carefully, clinging to her bleeding shoulder. “He didn’t know who I was,” Steve had whispered. His emotions played across his face, sorrow and loss and fear making him look years older. It was not the time, as she leaned against the wall and slowly bled out, to tell him _I think your brainwashed best friend trained me how to kill men with my thighs. And also we might have slept together._

            And when Steve faced Bucky, when he sent the most advanced weapons system in the world plunging into the Potomac, that was not the time to tell him either. She spent the next few weeks dealing with the United States government and the U.N. while Steve healed and decided what to do next. She couldn’t tell him without being absolutely sure, and she didn’t have time or energy for the laborious process of piecing her cracked memories together. Natasha couldn’t tell Steve what she was starting to remember, but she could keep the gears of bureaucracy from grinding him to dust. So she testified in front of a Senate committee and hundreds of reporters, danced around the federal agents tailing her, and kept the nation's attention directed away from the slowly healing super soldier.

            And when Steve had asked her if she could track down any information from Russia about the Winter Soldier, she had done it. Irena had been surprised to see her, but said she was willing to help for the sake of their shared Red Room memories. Natasha personally thought it was more out of interest in the Winter Soldier, but she accepted the help anyway. There was little that could get in the way of two red room graduates determined to track down information.

            She almost told him in the graveyard when she gave him the file. But the idea that she was wrong held her back. When memories resurfaced from her Red Room days, they were always confusing. Sometimes they were true memories, but sometimes they were memory implants. It was unlikely, but still possible, that someone had given her memories of training and sleeping with the Winter Soldier for a brief period, then erased them. Or she could have been mixing him up with someone else, her brain struggling under her tortured memories to connect sights with smells and sounds and touches that may or may not have happened.

            She’d turned down Stark’s offer to let her recuperate in Stark Tower (the man was insisting on calling it Avengers Tower, which in fairness did sound less egocentric). She’d thought about it, but wasn’t sure with her current emotional state she could stand to be around Stark. Her burgeoning friendship with Pepper was surprisingly enjoyable, and she didn’t want to compromise it by complaining about Pepper’s boyfriend.

            So instead she fled to a safe house in rural Kentucky, chosen because she was positive no one would think to look there. There, against the insistent hum of cicadas and slick humidity against her skin, she pieced her memories together.

           

            _“Fourteen, what mistake did you make?” The trainees were only numbers in the Red Room until they earned the right to a name. Natalia Romanova was growing tired of her number and she knew she was close to earning her name back. But the legendary Winter Soldier had appeared, and seemed especially critical of her._

_“I struck too slow,” she said, letting none of her irritation creep into her voice. The girl who would grow into Irena Gusarova watched her from the floor where Natalia had flung her moments ago. “Trainee Seven could have prepared a counterstrike.” She hadn’t, but that wouldn’t matter._

_After practice, the Winter Soldier had pulled her aside. “You are capable of more,” he told her. His Russian was near perfect, she noted, but occasionally one word would come out with an accent she didn’t recognize. “I am pushing you because you have the capability to be one of the greatest of the Black Widows, Natalia Alianova Romanova._

_At eleven years old, it was the first time she’d heard her name in four years. She didn’t know it could be poetry._

_At sixteen, Natalia Romanova was undercover as Alina, a ballet dancer. When she killed the daughter of a man attempting to defect, her superiors had smiled. “Well done with your assignment with Drakov’s daughter. The Winter Soldier was right about you.” For the next week, Natalia has dream after dream where her hands are covered in icy cold blood._

_Thirteen and the Winter Soldier appeared, looking no older than the last time she’d seen him two years before. “Guns,” he told the trainees, no look of recollection when he saw her face. “We are going to work with guns today.” For years, all that would she would remember from this day was the smell of gunpowder and the shriek of a nameless thirteen year old girl. She would never remember why that girl had shrieked._

_Somewhere around twenty-two and Yelena Belonova was frowning at her. “Natalia, you weren’t….in love with your partner, were you?”_

_“Love is for children,” she said. It was engraved on her mind the way that scars were carved into her back. She wasn’t sure where either had come from, but their absolute certainty of their existence was, in an odd way, comforting._

_Nearly nineteen, and her superiors are smiling at her. “You are to have the great honor of serving with The Winter Soldier.” She had long since stopped believing their rhetoric, but she’d take the chance to improve her skills with this man._

_  
_

_Twenty-six, and Irena has found her in a café in France. “Defection looks good on you, Natalia.”_

_“It’s Natasha, now,” she says, smiling at the woman who is not quite a friend but, she is confident, not an enemy. “You’re wearing it well too, I see.”_

_Irena shrugged. “When I left, they told me the Winter Soldier would come for all of us traitors.” There is a hint of laughter in her voice._

_Natasha snorts. “As though the daughters of the Red Room could be frightened by a ghost story.” She remembers, suddenly, a flash of silver, but she does not mention it to Irena. Nor, later, does she mention it to Clint. She remembers odd things often; the smell of kerosene in a dark house, or the sharp scent of snow mixed with pine needles, or dogs barking and men yelling in Italian.  It’s rare for her to place them, and she has stopped being bothered by them. In two weeks, she will hear a song on the radio and start screaming. Then, she will begin learning how to reconstruct her memories, but not today while she basks in the sunshine of Southern France, waiting for her mark to arrive._

_Nineteen, and she is looking at the Winter Soldier in a forest swallowed by white snow somewhere in Germany. “Do you have a name besides ‘Winter Soldier’?”_

_Nineteen, and the Winter Soldier is giving her a humorless grin as she slams on the gas in a stolen car. She can smell smoke in the distance and hear the cracking of gunshots._

_Nineteen, and there is a broken lamp on her right and a warm body on the left side of her bed. She can see her black dress across the room, the Winter Soldier’s boots by the door._

Yes, she decided after a few weeks on her own. She’d definitely had sex with Steve’s childhood friend.

            She couldn’t remember why he’d been there. Had Hydra lent him to the Russians to train black widows? Had he been sent to a dying USSR to try to continue the Cold War that hadn’t ever exploded into nuclear war? She racked her memories, but there was nothing. If she’d ever known, it was lost behind a fog of brainwashing.

It took her a few more days to call him, but by then she was ready to escape the humidity and cicadas and being trapped with only her memories for company. “Steve,” she said when he picked up. “How is the search going?”

            “Somehow,” Steve said, “he’s gotten to Germany.” The connection was full of static, and Natasha couldn’t tell if he was optimistic or dejected or just tired.

            “I know German, if you need a hand,” she offered casually.

            Steve of course accepted, and Natasha knew that she should wait to have this conversation in person. Instead she forged ahead with an impatience she thought had been beaten out of her by the time she was ten. “Steve, there’s something I need to tell you about Bucky.” She still wanted to laugh, knowing that the most feared assassin in the world was named Bucky. She couldn’t keep calling him that.

            “What is it, Natasha?” Steve asked. She knew without being able to hear it that Steve was concerned for her, but he didn’t bother expressing pity. It was one of the things she liked about the Super Soldier; his concern for her as a human never overtook his respect for her as an assassin.

            Natasha Romanoff took a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure before, but I think that I knew your friend. In the Red Room. And outside of it.”

            There was a long pause. Then, at Steve’s gentle urging, she told him the story.


	2. Forgive me that I manage badly, manage badly but live gloriously

Sam picked her up from the airport in Germany. Natasha had her bright red hair cut short and pulled under a blond wig. He found her by the Captain America tee-shirt she was wearing. If she was going to play the role of American tourist, she was going to go all the way.

“How was your flight?” Sam asked as they left the airport.

“Sneaking into a country with a fake background, a forged passport and an itchy wig was not quite as bad as it sounds. I’ve had worse flights.” Natasha smiled as she realized that he and Steve had rented a car. Germany had excellent public transportation, but the two Americans would be used to driving cars.

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Worse flights, huh? There’s a story there.”

_I once killed someone on a flight by poisoning his Sprite, then spent a week lying to Interpol agents about it._ She respected Sam, and even liked him, but they weren’t to the point where she’d start casually discussing murders that she’d committed. Instead, she said “Well, the woman sitting next to me didn’t get drunk and start crying about her ex-husband, so it really wasn’t that bad. How are you doing?”

It sounded like small talk, and Sam would take it that way if he wanted. But taking down a corrupted government agency, then taking off to hunt down a man who’d tried to kill him might be taking an emotional toll. She would give him the chance to talk about it, if he wanted.

Sam considered the answer for a moment. “Well, my life has changed dramatically. I worry how the VA is getting on without me. I miss the wings,” he said, and the wistfulness and pain in his voice was an honesty that she’d never have allowed herself. “Still, this feels important. It _is_ important.”

_Why_ , she wanted to ask, but Sam was her friend and not a mark, so she held herself back and didn’t try manipulating him into answering her. Instead, she nodded.

“Traveling around Europe isn’t bad either,” he said, and she grinned.

“I hope we swing by Paris,” she said, letting the conversation move away from heavy emotions.

“I know a great café.”

“We can only hope the Winter Soldier plans based on location to excellent cafes.” Sam grit his teeth as someone swerved in front of them. “Steve could use some cafes.”

Good, she’d wanted to talk about this. “How is he doing?”

“I didn’t know him very well before we started dropped helicarriers into rivers, but he seemed very lost.”

“Yes,” she agreed. Fury had asked for her evaluation of Steve’s health on more than one occasion. Captain America had certainly improved since they’d first met in New York, but she had grown increasingly concerned about the potential for depression and what could be construed as near-suicidal behavior. Of course, all historical files suggested that Steve Rogers had always been, in Fury’s words, “a reckless little shit” so it might just be Steve.

Sam sighed. “It’s good for him to have something to throw himself against. I think he missed having a cause he truly believed in. But finding out your best friend was an assassin for decades takes some mental adjustment. And he’s not bothering to adjust.”

“Has he recognized that Bucky –” she just couldn’t call him that, “might not be the person that he remembers?”

“On some level, I think so. He hasn’t talked about it with me though.” Sam glanced at her, and she braced herself for the question. “Does Bucky Barnes sound like the man you met?”

“Not at all,” she said, and shifted the conversation to something else.

* * *

Steve smiled at her when she walked into the hotel room. “Hey, Tasha.”

It was nice to see him again, and she returned his grin. She also appreciated that he wasn’t sentimental enough to try hugging her. Americans, she had found after defecting, were awfully fond of hugs. “Do you having any leads on him?” she asked as she sat down, then felt a surge of annoyance at herself. This wasn’t a mission, and she shouldn’t expect regular sitreps and reports. Treating it like a mission might not encourage a healthy mindset in Steve.

Steve didn’t seem to mind that she was getting straight to business. “We’ve tracked him here, but we’re getting conflicting indications about where to go next. There’s a farmer claiming he gave a man with Bucky’s description a ride north, but it’s still a slim lead. But there’s a mall in Berlin that had a break-in, and the figure certainly matches Bucky’s description. But ‘white male with brown hair’ is a pretty common description.”

“He wouldn’t be caught on a camera if he didn’t want to be,” she said. “And you don’t need someone’s permission to get a ride somewhere. He could have done it without being seen. Do you have any ideas about what he’s after?” Natasha knew that she’d have to stop calling the man ‘he’ eventually, but she couldn’t bring herself to call the man she’d known ‘Bucky.’ Perhaps she could call him ‘James.’

Sam groaned in response to her question. “We know he’s mostly been in areas with suspected Hydra activity, enough that we don’t think it’s a coincidence. But we don’t know where he’s getting the information, and some of his stops don’t make sense. New York doesn’t have much related to Hydra, nor does Montreal.”

“New York could be because he knows Steve was there, and perhaps he found a way out of the country in Montreal,” she suggested. Something about Montreal tugged on her memory but there was a haziness when she tried to follow it. She had to stop herself from grinding her teeth; she’d run into enough mental roadblocks to recognize when someone had played with her memories. Almost unconsciously shaking her head, she asked “Where else has he been?”

“Here, obviously. A brief stop in a small town in Spain. We found that one because there was a casualty.” Sam’s voice went carefully polite.

“Someone had been tortured.” Steve’s voice was completely flat.

Natasha thought about pushing him, then backed off. The information would be useful, but Steve clearly didn’t want to talk about it. She’d ask Sam later. “Where else?”

Sam counted on his fingers. “Liverpool was his stop after Montreal. Then Essex, then down to a town in Northern France, then here. Fury contacted us briefly, and confirmed that he’s noticed Hyrda activity in all of those cities. He couldn’t tell us much else, though.”

“We can’t just look everywhere that there’s been Hydra activity,” Steve said. He carried his emotions so physically, she’d noticed while working with him. Frustration dragged his shoulders inward, made creases in his forehead. He was stagnating, letting his frustration and anxiety over James build up like water behind a dam. Sam was right about Steve needing something to throw himself. The Falcon, already high in her esteem, went up another notch.

“We could backtrack,” she suggested. “There’s something in my head about Montreal. It’s not much.” This could drag the conversation into places she didn’t want it to go, but it was also the only idea she had.

Steve, thankfully, didn’t take that opportunity to say “speaking of things in your head, let’s talk about how you managed to remember having a relationship with my best friend.” It was a conversation they might need to have eventually. She wasn’t concerned about Steve being bitter; Captain America wasn’t the sort of person to be upset that two of his friends had supported each other during the worst period in their lives. Natasha was far more concerned with the day that he would ask “What was Bucky like?”

It would be hard to answer honestly without admitting that James Buchanan Barnes had been the best assassin she’d ever seen. During that long struggle for her memories, she had remembered the thrill of being allowed to be trained by one of the most talented killers Russia had ever known before she’d been able to get any details of their relationship.

But to her relief, Steve left that conversation for another day. “Do you think that Montreal is likely to lead us to answers?”

It thrilled her to be trusted like this. People had generally trusted her tactical assessments, but to be trusted on a personal level, as part of a deeply personal mission for someone else who knew what she’d done? Natasha hadn’t expected anyone to show her that trust, ever. It had been shocking enough when Clint had; she’d hadn’t even thought to hope it would ever happen again.

“I can’t say for certain if we’ll find anything there,” she said in answer to Steve’s question. “There’s something in my mind, but it could be completely unrelated to the Winter Soldier. It could be completely related. I could have run a mission there with him; maybe I had a passing thought about him while visiting the city. There’s no way to know.”

Steve sighed, the most defeated sound she’d ever heard him make. Sam patted him on the back. “C’mon man. We’ve still got some things around here to look into. And we’ve got a backup plan in the worst case.”

“I just-” Steve said, curling his hands into fists. “I just want to know why he’s…I mean he’s trying to hunt down Hydra, but he’s torturing people, and he seemed to remember who I was…”

Natasha exchanged a worried glance with Sam. Steve looked close to tears, not that she could blame him. But she’d never seen her fellow Avenger quite this raw before. Sam looked every bit as worried as she did.

_We both know enough about reading people to see exactly how bad this is,_ she thought. _But neither of us knows enough to fix him._

Movement would be good. Getting Steve up and moving, not letting him stagnate. It couldn’t make things worse.

“Steve, if anyone is going to have a way to find him, it’s you and me,” she said. “I’m probably one of the people in the world who knows the most about the Winter Soldier.” _I can’t remember half of it, but let’s not emphasize that._ “And I’m not leaving until we find him.  You know more than anyone alive about Barnes. We can do this.”

Steve nodded. Natasha could see his mask slipping into place, back to the careful, controlled embodiment of American virtues. Time for something to lighten the mood. “Plus we’ve got Sam and he can fly.”

“And I drop helicarries into rivers,” Sam added.

“On occasion.”

“It’s a hobby.”

“Good exercise.”                                                        

Steve cracked something that could have been a smile if she were very, very optimistic and inclined to lie to herself. She almost sighed as Sam pulled out a map of the city to show her what they’d been doing. Things were worse than she’d expected.

***

 

Later, when Sam offered to go out and pick up some dinner, Natasha offered to go with him, offering her passable German as a reason. Once there were a block away, she turned to Sam. “Tell me about what happened in Spain.”

Sam sighed. “He’d tortured a woman. It was hard to get many details, especially with the language barrier. But we know that it was professional, clinical. The woman turned out to be a Hydra scientist.”

She thought about what that meant. “Is there any chance that he’s still working for Hydra? Cleaning up loose ends?”

Sam shook his head. “It’s extremely unlikely, given that we’ve been able to track him at all. Hydra was a lot more careful with him than that.”

A reasonable assumption, and she trusted Sam’s assessment. “So then he’s on his own, and he’s clearly angry. But the fact that he got out of the country suggests a high degree of capability. Or that he’s working with someone else.” She hated to suggest it, hated to think of Barnes – of James having teamed up with someone who might be an enemy. But the possibility had to be faced.

“But the cleanness of the torture suggests someone who’s in control of his mental processes, capable of logical decision making. He’s not a loose cannon wandering around Europe. Even if he was working with someone else, it’s unlikely that they’d be able to make him achieve torture that clinical.” Sam’s voice had taken on a tone that she recognized from years of giving mission reports and discussing situations in the field.

Natasha nodded. “There’s a good chance that we can save him, then.” She offered the sentiment up, consciously letting Sam see her worry, her weakness, ignoring the years of training that screamed at her to bury her emotions.

Sam misinterpreted her tension. “Yeah, we can. And Nat, I just want you to know that we’re both really glad to have you here.”

Against all logic, panic flared in her stomach. She wanted to tell this good man not to be glad, not to trust her and rely on her. She hadn’t been able to do the right thing, even when she’d left Russia and taken up with SHIELD. Taken up with Hydra too, apparently, and done damage on their behalf that she might never know the extent of.

Natasha shoved her emotions aside, to be dealt with later. Sam was waiting for a response, and he was a trained therapist. She was good, probably good enough to hide her feelings, but she was jetlagged and tired and confront half remembered demons from her past. She might slip.

But Sam didn’t seem to notice anything awry as she flashed him a bright smile. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone that left me comments and gave kudos already. Y'all convinced me to push past the anxiety and finish editing this chapter and post it.
> 
> I know that there isn't a ton of action in this chapter, but I needed to establish everyone's emotional state and make sure that I understand Natasha as well as Sam, who I've never written before. The next chapter will have a bit more action, and I promise that there won't be a 6 month wait.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone!


	3. A Terrible Festival of Dead Leaves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up, this chapter gets into a bit of Natasha's Red Room past. I haven't included anything graphic, but there's some violence against children and murder. Also there's a lot of throwing up in this chapter. And...yeah I think that's it? Oh, implied torture.
> 
> Maybe I should up the rating

Stuttgart, where Natasha had met up Sam and Steve, became their base. First, they investigated the truck that had left town with a man matching Bucky’s description. The farmer, it turned out, had not transported a famed assassin out of town on his truck. The police solved the break-in at the Berlin mall. Once again, it had not been a legendary spy.

They each handled the dead ends differently. Steve wore down the carpet in their hotel room and left irate voice mails for Fury, went on early morning runs and tried to take his frustration out on the sidewalks of Stuttgart. Natasha wondered if his stamina made running less of a stress relief for him than it would have been for others, but at least it got him out of the hotel room. Still, they couldn’t go much longer before someone finally realized it was Captain America running around at five o’clock in the morning, instead of just a runner in a tight shirt. Eventually, someone’s eyes would actually make it to his face instead of settling on his abs and pecs, and suddenly the whole world would be wondering why Captain America was hanging around Germany.

Sam was stressed too, but he wore it differently. Steve’s worry settled on him hard, slid into the cracks in his confidence and froze like ice in the winter, cracking him the way that ice, given time, could break open rocks. Sam, on the other hand, covered his worry, masked it behind kindness and thoughtfulness. He reminded Steve to eat, brought Natasha German pastries, and smiled far too much. The more he did for them, the more Natasha worried. Sam would wear himself as surely as Steve would crack open; she’d forced enough people to that point on missions that she could see when it was happening. That Sam was taking it so hard surprised her; clearly there was something bothering him beyond their inability to find Barnes.

Natasha was _not_ thinking about how she was handling the stress, because she didn’t want to. She would allow herself this limited cowardice after the month she’d spent in Kentucky before joining Steve and Sam. Looking at her own memories and emotions as though they were case files was tiring.

But as Steve grew more and more frustrated, while Sam became increasingly, worryingly cheerful, Natasha knew it was necessary.

She sent the boys out to sightsee the next day, then claimed she wasn’t feeling well before they left. Sam raised an eyebrow, but let her lie stand as he hustled Steve out the door. She appreciated it. Digging through her memories of the Red Room was uncomfortable at best; it would be horrible with an audience.

Once Natasha was sure they were gone – no dashing back to grab a forgotten wallet – she sat down on the hotel floor, crossing her legs as though meditating. Clint had dragged her to a yoga class in her early days of SHIELD, telling her it would be good for her. To her surprise she’d enjoyed it, though the meditation had taken her a while to wrap her head around. Clint had sulked when she passed him in skill.

Reconstructing her memories was obviously different from meditating, but they started similarly. Natasha let her mind empty, setting aside her worries about Sam and Steve, her thoughts about the German sitcom she’d watched the night before, the drone of traffic outside the window. Finally calm, she sank into her memory.

So much of her nineteenth year was missing. She began there, looking for details that stood out, actions that didn’t make sense. It meant examining mission after mission, remembering a corpse shredded by bullets, a woman in a charred blue dress, a man floating in a pool as she walked away, an ever increasing list of actions she’d never atone for, murders and arsons, a _war…_

Natasha stopped. Where had _that_ come from?

Her subconscious was a labyrinth of repressed memories and traumas. If she had done something as major as start a war, there was no way the Red Room would have been able to completely wipe it. She would have been euphoric at her success, thought about it often. She’d have reported to her superiors over and over, told other Widows the story, and followed the news of the war unfolding. Her superiors would have missed something, a conversation or comment or - Ah. There it was.

_Yelena grinned at her, blond hair pinned back for sparring. The room was full of grunts from the other sparring trainees. “Heard you bagged an ambassador and started a war. Not bad, Natashka. More impressive if you’d done it without help though.”_

_Natasha – no, she was Natalia then, still a Russian – frowned at the nickname, then twisted to avoid a punch from Yelena. There was sweat dripping down her back. “You’ll have to try harder, Lena. I’m not that easily distracted.”_

Natasha stretched and tried to ignore her shaking hands. Slowly, she went into the bathroom and poured herself a glass of water, then downed it like a shot. When she was done, her hands were no longer shaking.

After that first repressed memory had come back in Buenos Aires, she’d started trying to bring back others. Clint had found her a month later, sitting on her couch and staring at the wall. “Did you know that we killed each other, Clint? When one of the trainees tried to escape, they sent the other trainees to track her down and take her out, then erased the memories. They just wanted to know which one of us were killers. Do you want to know how many I killed?”

Clint had immediately dragged her to see a SHIELD therapist. Who had brought in a team of therapists. Who had eventually convinced her that digging around in her memories to find more reasons to hate herself was counterproductive to the work that she was trying to do as a SHIELD agent.

Natasha had forced herself to accept that, because the other option was to keep pulling out memories until she drowned in her own guilt.

It was necessary to pull out her memories sometimes, but she tried to skirt around things like _starting a war_.

But based on Yelena’s comment, she hadn’t started a war alone. The Winter Soldier might have helped. The Winter Soldier better have helped, for what she was about to put herself through.  She grit her teeth and settled back down onto the floor.

***

_A small room, the smell of cooking rye bread and pork marinated with baravykas mushrooms coming from the restaurant downstairs. The cool feel of a sniper rifle under her fingers._

_“So, Montreal, convince me that I should let you pull the trigger.”_

_The name irritated her, though it was standard operating procedure. Before the trainees could achieve the rank of Black Widow, they were given code names of well-known Western cities, as though they were not yet skilled enough to achieve a Russian code name._

_“You’ve always seemed a fan of ‘learning by doing” she said rather than voice her displeasure._

_He snorted, a hint of amusement. “I see you’re still bitter about me throwing you into the wall when we first met.”_

_“You did not throw me into the wall.”_

_“Almost to the wall.”_

_She snorted and turned back to the window, hiding her smile. Keeping the banter up would have been lovely, but the ambassador would be arriving soon._

Natasha stumbled into the bathroom, chest constricting, and slammed the shower on, barely able to see what she was doing. Heedless of her clothes, she stepped into the shower, letting the painfully hot water burn her skin. It let her remember that she was in a shower, in Germany, not in a tiny room in Latveria, with her hand _wrapped around a rifle, breathing stale air, tense and jumpy but determined not to disappoint him_ –

Acid rose up in her throat and she was back in her body, in the present, as breakfast forced its way out of her mouth, spewing across the floor as she stumbled out of the shower in a panic and dove towards the toilet. For a moment she stared at the vomit, then grimaced as another wave of nausea swept over her and she threw up again.

“Germany,” she whispered, “you’re in Germany.” The sound of her voice comforted her, though it was raw from vomiting. The porcelain was cool against her palms as she gripped the toilet. Her clothes were wet against her skin, her wet hair stuck to her cheeks. It had been long, that night in Latveria, _she’d had to push her hair back when_ – no. no, stay in the present. Her hair was short. She’d cut it after the fall of SHIELD, before leaving to join Sam and Steve. Germany, not Ukraine. Avenger, not KGB. Not a murderer.

Always a murderer, always, you didn’t stop being a murderer, especially after she’d been so _proud_ , had _turned to look at him for approval as she broke down the gun, while screams broke out below and she was smiling. She felt electric, the sense of gathering power before a lightning strike that even thunder couldn’t keep up with_ \- No, not electricity, not lightning, just a girl who didn’t understand that she was a weapon dressed up in pretty metaphors. She’d been so young, she was still young, _nineteen and grinning up at the Winter Soldier as they crept away from the scene, his own grin matching hers as they strolled through side streets and back alleys._

Natasha made a fist and slammed it against the ground. Skin broke and she was back, firmly, the pain grounding her in the present.

After perhaps fifteen minutes she felt confident that she wasn’t going on any more accidental trips through her memories. She changed from her wet clothes into one of the hotel robes, and collapsed onto a bed.

 _What the hell was that?_ She wondered.

She’d assassinated an ambassador and kicked off a war between Latveria, a longtime critic of Soviet policy, and someone else. Apparently the tiny detail of who she’d started the war with hadn’t mattered. That had weakened Latveria and drawn attention away from the struggling USSR. The Winter Soldier had helped.

 It made sense that they’d erased the memories of the Winter Soldier; a deadly legend didn’t stay a legend if multiple Widows knew of his existence, and it wasn’t that hard to erase memories while preserving skills. What didn’t make sense was her reaction to trying to remember. She’d had a few headaches back in Kentucky as she pieced her memories together, but she’d never gotten lost in her memories, never thrown up and been unable to remember what decade she was in.

Whatever had happened on that mission, the Red Room hadn’t just ripped out pieces; they’d made sure that any probing left her incapacitated, lost in her memories. Her other memories of the Winter Soldier didn’t have that. Either they hadn’t been able to fully erase the memory of that mission, or they were desperate not to have her see it. Or both.

“Дерьмо́” she hissed. Then she grit her teeth and headed back into the bathroom. If she was going to throw up again, she wanted to at least be close to the toilet.

***

Noises. The creak of a door opening, two male voices coming towards her. How long had she been in this room, back against the wall, hands on the tile floor?

“Hey Tasha, you missed out on – Tasha?”

“Maybe she went out. Maybe she wanted us out so she could do some super spy stuff.”

“Nah, she’d have told us if she had any leads. Natasha, are you gonna jump out of a closet or something? Because that’s really juvenile.” The door to the room she was in opened. “Tasha, why are you – _Natasha_?”

She flinched as the man came closer. Too big, too fast, flying towards her and dropping down beside her. He was so close to her. She would never be able to fight him. But maybe he was a handler, maybe she wasn’t supposed to fight him. She remembered pain, remembered pain in a dark room with a song playing on the radio. _Pain as a tall brunette broke her small fingers in front of staring children while she tried not to scream, still a young child herself. A tall, dark-haired man looking down at her in Latveria._

_“Natalia, we can’t do this.”_

_“Can’t or won’t?”_

_“I’m serious. Do you know what will happen to you if the Red Room finds out?”_

_“Yes. Do you know what your handlers will do to you? Because I can imagine. If it’s bad enough, if you’re saying no because you want to avoid that, then this never happened. But don’t back away on my account. They made me strong enough to handle whatever they do to me.” She knew every trick to seducing a mark and she refused to use them. This would be honest or it would be nothing._

“Natasha, what happened? Did someone attack? Are you okay?”

Another man behind him. “Steve, I – I think you’re scaring her.”

The blond man moved back slightly. She risked glancing at him. Concern on his face. Had she failed a mission? Had

She risked speaking. “Есть у нас в России?” *

The man in the back frowned. “I think that was Russian.”

The blond frowned. “Natasha? Can you speak English?”

Did she know English? Maybe. “Unde sunt?” No, that wasn’t right. She couldn’t disappoint the teachers of the Red Room. “Where am I?”

Both men looked horrified. The wrong language again. Three failures. She tried again. If she was right, they might be less angry. “Où suis-je?”

“Natasha, you’re in Germany.” The blond hesitated. “Tasha, do you know who we are?”

Germany? Why was she there? She remembered Russia, Ukraine, Spain, _Morocco, Latveria going mad after an assassination_ , _the Winter Soldier kissing her in a dingy hotel room, his hand wrapped around her waist, her hands curled in his hair._

_“Glad we’re in agreement, Soldier.” She couldn’t keep the smile out of her voice._

_“Why?” he whispered, and his voice was cracked and raw._

_She moved backwards from him, letting her heartbeat settle. He needed to know that this was the truth, not the product of lust fueled longing or manipulation. “You laughed at my jokes,” she whispered back._

_“That’s a low bar, Natalia.”_

_She loved the way he said her name, enunciating every syllable like it was poetry. “You wanted to laugh at them since the first mission that we ran together, but you wouldn’t. I knew there was someone else trapped in there. Took a while to see him, though.”_

_He gave a small laugh. “So I was a challenge?”_

_“I liked to be around you,” she said. “I liked the way your eyes lit up when I almost managed to pin you, how far your range with a pistol is, how much you enjoyed borscht on that mission in Lensk and then got embarrassed when I noticed it.”_

_“Oh,” and leaned back towards her. “So you’re in love with me then.”_

_He kissed her before she could think of an answer._

She didn’t know why she’d be in Germany. She’d have to figure out later; the men would want an answer. “No. I don’t know who you are, specifically.” They’d meant specifically, right? “But you’re Red Room.” Both men’s eyes widened. “You are Red Room, right?”

The one in the back swore. The blond leaned closer. She wanted to flinch back, but she could not show fear or weakness. She was a Black Widow. She was a daughter of the Red Room. Whatever they did, she had survived worse.

“Tasha, it’s me Steve. This is Sam. We’re all in Germany together, looking for Bucky.”

“Steve,” she whispered. That felt right. “Steve?” She reached one hand out, slowly, braced for any sign of anger or even disapproval. Very carefully, she touched his arm. It was solid, muscled, and not flying towards her face to slap her. That was good.

“Yes Natasha,” he whispered. “We fought together. Aliens in New York. You had me throw you up so that you could jump on the back of some flying machine.”

_Wind whipping her hair, the smell of burning mixed with the metallic tang of alien weapons. The alien’s skin – or armor maybe? – was cool and felt like some sort of shell._

“Steve, man, I don’t know what’s going on here. We might need to call someone.”

“Natasha, please.”  The man – Steve – sounded like he was begging. “You know me.”

Aliens in New York? Yes, she remembered that, remembered a hole in the sky that spat out monsters. And before that, a man with an eyepatch, a man in a red metal suit, a man grinning at her from behind a crossbow in the pouring rain. Avengers.

For a moment, briefly, everything made sense.

And then someone shoved a knife into her forehead, split open her skull, and she couldn’t scream, could only throw her head back as her entire head burned and burned, back arching because it hurt so much.

She shoved Steve backwards and twisted towards the toilet as bile rose up again.

“Natasha?!”

“I’m throwing up Sam,” she gasped. “Just hold on.”

Steve sighed in relief. “That sounds like Nat.”

“Don’t call me that,” she muttered.

When she was done she spat, wishing the taste of vomit would clear out of her mouth. “I can’t remember the last time I threw up this much. It’s been very excessive.”

“Tasha, what the hell happened?” Steve was still on the ground beside her, his eyes wide. “I don’t think you knew who we were.”

She didn’t want to have this conversation, not with her head still pounding and adrenaline spiking through her bloodstream. “Just give me a minute.” She stood up and then nearly fell on Steve. Her instincts hissed at her for showing weakness, but she ignored them.

“I’m gonna sit down,” she said, and Steve and Sam had to practically carry her to a bed.

There was blessed silence when she collapsed on the bed. The only sound was her own breathing.

“Natasha,” Sam said finally. “What happened there? I mean, you were gone. You weren’t you.”

They deserved an explanation. She must have terrified them, curled up in the corner of the bathroom like a frightened animal. “I got lost, sort of. I was trying to see if I could remember anything that would be helpful, and I found a spot that had been…altered.”

“What.” Sam said flatly, not as a question but as a demand of a universe that was constantly throwing him curveballs.

“My memory is like a forest.” Natasha said. “In some places, people came in and chopped down trees. In other places, they planted new ones. It’s hard to tell what’s native and what’s not, what’s been added or taken. But sometimes I can catch something. Like a footprint, or a broken branch where someone stepped. Given enough time and an idea of what to look for, I can often try to piece together what happened. Hmm…maybe I see two trees that are growing too close together. Or they didn’t cut out all of the roots, or there’s old leaves still sitting on the ground. Removing memories isn’t clean. It’s difficult, but often I can get an impression or phrase or detail. Then I go from there. I found a place that had been bulldozed, replanted, and been surrounded by bear traps.”

Sam frowned. “How did trying to remember something make you…like that?”

“I realized that something had been taken,” she said. “So I looked harder. But it had also been…booby trapped, sort of. So when I looked at it I got sort of lost in the forest. I just wandered through all my memories, especially my older memories. So I thought I was back in Russia.” In the Red Room, where she’d been trained, become an assassin, fallen in love with the Winter Soldier.

It had been love, all those years ago. She was sure of it now.

“Why?” Sam asked, aghast. “Why would anyone do that?”

The question surprised her. She could think of plenty of reasons to alter and rig the memories of an operative. If someone were to undergo intense trauma, or receive information classified above their level…but both men were looking utterly horrified. Clint or Maria had occasionally wore the same expression when she revealed something of her childhood in Russia. She so often forgot, when around other highly trained individuals, how very brutal her own experiences had been.

No need to go into that with Sam. “They didn’t want me to remember a specific mission that I’d worked with the Winter Soldier.”

Steve straightened up and suddenly he was Captain America, the star spangled man with a plan. She saw the man who’d spent his early twenties cutting a swathe through Hydra forces, died, came back, and fought off an alien invasion. To top it off, he’d brought down SHIELD in a single day, all because he thought it was the right thing to do. And now all of that was focused on her. “Did you remember any of it? What details can you recall? Do you know…” at Sam’s glare, he backed off, apparently remembering that he’d just found Natasha whimpering in a bathroom. “It’s fine if you don’t,” he said, utterly failing so seem genuine.

Natasha smiled at him, though perhaps it was less a smile and more a satisfied show of teeth. “Rogers, I’m insulted. You think a couple of KGB guys playing around in my head could really stop me from getting something I wanted?”

Sam reached a hand out, slowly, and touched her shoulder. He’d offered comfort, a physical grounding in this moment, and he’d done it slowly enough that she could avoid it if she wasn’t up to being touched. What good had she done in this life to deserve knowing a man like Sam Wilson? “Natasha, you know what you’re capable of better than I do. But don’t feel like you have to do that to yourself to prove something, or because you’re responsible.”

“It was necessary,” she said with a shrug. “And useful.”

Steve leaned forward, eyes bright. “So how much do you remember about the mission?” 

Natasha flashed him that same teeth-barring grin. “All of it. And I have some ideas about where to start looking for Barnes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about any mistranslations; I used google translate.  
> “Дерьмо́” – Shit (Russian)  
> “Есть у нас в России?” - Are we in Russia? (Russian)  
> “Unde sunt?” - Where am I? (Romanian)  
> “Où suis-je?” - Where am I? (French)
> 
> Goodness this got really, really long. I wrote a chapter, then rewrote it, then edited the crap out of it and made my poor betas read it over and over. And now it's probably too long, and it nearly doubled the length of my fic. Consider it a long apology for that six month break between chapters 1 and 2.
> 
> I think that, since Natasha was born in ‘82 and states that she traded in the KGB for SHIELD/Hydra, it’s fair to assume that the USSR lasted longer in the MCU than in actual history. I figure that Hydra was probably strengthening the USSR in the interest of continuing the Cold War, hence why they’d have lent out the Winter Soldier as the USSR’s power declined. However, I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable enough or a good enough writer to write something that really gets into the details of this alternate version of history, so I haven’t really dug into it because I thought that would be better than running roughshod over actual history.
> 
> Latveria is a fictional country in the 616 universe that is ruled by Doctor Doom. I’ve left out the Doctor Doom bit because, frankly, I wanted to. Also I don’t think I could make someone called ‘Doctor Doom’ into a serious character. My Latveria looks nothing like the marvel comics one, obviously, but I didn’t want to mess around with actual history too much because, again, I don’t think I’d be good at it, so I picked a fictional country and ran with it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm finally posting the first chapter of this in honor of Buckynat week on Tumblr. I'm thinking 7 or so chapters. The title of the work and chapter titles are taken from Anna Akhmatova poems.
> 
> Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!


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